Friday, October 14, 2016

Bitmessage is
a decentralized, encrypted, peer-to-peer, trustless communication
protocol which is used to send encrypted messages to one or multiple
persons. Bitmessage uses public key cryptography to encrypt a message
and mix the encrypted message along with other encrypted messages, so
that users’ identity remains concealed.

The concept of
Bitmessage was first developed by software developer Jonathan Warren
in 2012. Its design is based on the decentralized digital currency
Bitcoin.
As the protocol is decentralized in nature and the encryption is
difficult to crack, Bitmessage has become quite popular since its
first release in November, 2012.

How does
Bitmessage work

Bitmessage is a
decentralized protocol. So, it works quite differently than other message encryption protocol.

All
Bitmessage users create their own anonymous P2P network. Each user
corresponds to a node in the network.

Each node has
a cryptographically generated address. This address resembles a
bitcoin address.

Bitmessage
uses public key cryptography. So, each node will have a pair of
cryptographic keys – a public key and a private key. These keys
resemble to bitcoin keys. To be specific, Bitmessage uses 256 bit
ECC
keys and OpenSSL for cryptographic functions.

If a sender
wants to send an encrypted message to someone, he encrypts it using
cryptographic key of the recipient and sends it across. As different
keys are used for encryption and decryption, not even the sender can
decrypt the message once it is sent.

The encrypted
message thus sent is mixed with all the encrypted messages sent by
all users, so that identity of the sender and the recipient remains
concealed.

Unlike other
encrypted message protocol, all the nodes in the P2P network will
receive all the messages. But, only the intended recipient would be
able to decrypt the message using his secret key and read it.

Bitmessage
nodes can store the encrypted messages only for two days. Messages
more than two days old are not archived in the network.

Bitmessage can be
accessed using Tor or I2P. It uses strong authentication to prevent
spoofed messages. Bitmessage has grown much popular since its first
release and now the Bitmessage network processes several thousands of
private messages everyday.